/agdg/ - Amateur Game Dev General

hearthstone already solved "mtg but streamlined"

you have to have some other gimmick, one that's powerful enough that people will put up with the buggy unbalanced mess you put out, because you simply don't have the resources to match any actual companies making tcgs.

Found and fixed both issues, thanks dude!

Pretentious term for "notes", unless you're like that Niklas Jansson faggot who makes GDDs without making games.

Fun (if not ridiculously long and detailed) read on Wario Land 4's game design and everything going into how and why stuff works with the player, was uploaded a few threads ago when it came up.

track3.mixtape.moe/kgvdue.pdf

>5am
>haven't slept
Disgusting. Go to bed at midnight or before, and wake up early for maximum morning comfy dev.

>being this much of a designlet
no one will play your clone

when I'm not crunching I love early mornings
But i tend to not be very productive until i come round

Having a general idea is good. Have a list of some key things you want in the game. But don't go into any extreme detail with it, that's just a waste of time. Things will change while you dev.
A working prototype is a better design document than a design document is.
Although, I've never written a story before, so I don't know, maybe story heavy games require more planning.

I'm probably not going to release it, it's just for me and my friends to play without spending gobs of money on another TCGs packs Thanks for thinking this will actually get completed though, I appreciate the sentiment.

And I already mentioned my gimmick, TWO mana types. That's TWICE the mana! Plus for once someone is actually asking for ideaguys. This is your time to shine.

Finally finished the boat, took longer than I thought it would. Really like how it turned out though. Now I gotta make some boulders, which for some reason I'm terrible at.

1am to 6-7am is best sleep schedule.

11pm/12 to 4:30/5 is actually better though. Those sunrises fulfill a man.

>bad at boulders
In a cartoony game like that they can just be basic shapes with some facets

22/5 mustardrace

Made it obvious that the death fog is actually deadly now. Also finally got the lead out of my ass and ripped out the spaghetti and actually made proper music and various other controllers.

Reposting shitty combat screen mockup for a shitty game for idiots

How did you solve your glass issue? Just frames and full transparency?

Yeah. I'm going to put a parallax outer-space effect outside it anyhow so it should but slightly more interesting to look at.

How do you split pay for a team of a programmer and an artist? Both ideaguy equally.

>mockup
Well alright.

Anyway, the player portraits have way too small of an impact on the health bar to the left, you should have them breach the bar, overlap with the sprite on the one above and double that white outline's thickness.

Also mockup the whole thing, I'm not seeing any combat options if this is turnbased.

As for the art style, the designs are fine, the two top PC designs are a bit weak and your art seems to suffer from low resolutions.

Depends on the game and depends on the contribution.

If you want to remain friends I would go 50/50. I would still go 50/50 if you don't, that kind of humility, as fake as it is, doesn't hurt your longterm reputation.

And it's a team of 2, so your revenue is probably going to be lousy anyway.

50/50 unless it's clear one side had more of a burden/commitment/risk

50/50 is the safest way to go

Flip a coin and go 100/0 to whoever calls it

51/49

Hmm, gave me some nice stuff to think on. Cheers user.

well I only have one game I've really worked on and several that I have varying degrees of ideas about making
for the most part it's just an outline of the concept and mechanics before I start working, and over time I fill in mechanic ideas, graphic ideas, story ideas, and whatever else, along with shorter-term stuff like "use code similar to this when you get around to making X feature"

>90's modding
>golden age
>TF, CS, JB etc.
>hundreds of high quality maps, modes, skins
>using same tools original devs used
>it's that easy
>early 2000's modding
>silver age
>specialized EZ tools like WC3 editor allow dota, TD, footman wars etc.
>total conversions are extremely dedicated labours by skilled veteran modders
>barely match quality of original products
>late 2000's
>next gen wasteland
>crysis, unreal 3, etc raise the bar to impossible standards
>remixing of existing assets into barely original imitations
>internal tools so arcane they're not much use to average
>2010's
>games like BF3 start actively opposing modding
>7 years later indie tools are still in development
>even if they somehow get finished and not immediately patched out
>even matching BF3 quality for a single asset is virtually impossible
>next-next gen happens
>near photorealism
>mocap, photogrammetry, hundreds of artists to make average game
>bar now not even on earth
>tools nonexistent

>if you make a game that looks like even 2004 quality nobody will play it
>only shitty memey shit like minecraft graphics will be accepted

why fucking even try

VR Progress

Updates
>Physics improvements. You now cannot cheat by moving your head around (previously disables physics on you). If your head goes over an open space, you fall immediately.
>Hand objects that can be colored. The color determines what items you can interact with (white is default and all colors can interact with it)
>Objects can be marked with a color to determine if they can be interacted with.
>Levels kill you when you fall off them now. Objects explode and disappear if they fall off the level.
>State scripts. Objects can be given states and there are state controllers that can modify them. This is used for obstacles like the Key touching the Unlocker which activates a state controller to transition the Wall and Unlocker into a faded state.
>Fading objects now looks better. Manually changing properties on the shader to make it Opaque when at 1 alpha or Fade if below that, and disabling them completely if they drop to 0.

Things to improve later
>Leaning over edges. Right now you fall if you lean slightly. This is likely easy, but your hands should let you lean over edges without allowing you to cheat too much (cross gaps with your hands apart)
>Prevent hands from reaching through walls to grab things.
>"You died" message for when you die.

Current goals
>More obstacles. Currently have "DisappearingObstacle", "KeyObject", and "KeyUnlocker".
>Item belt that you can attach things you pick up to it so you can use both hands for the puzzles
>Radial dial menu in game
>Ability to reposition the player in the real world without affecting the in game character.
>A Timer for speedrunning, an a UI element to go with it.
>Collectables in level that may be required to complete a level.
>Sounds and the architecture around them

Things have been going really well ever since I created a bunch of "User Stories" of things I wanted to get done. Even though I did very little this weekend and mostly just slept.

I also gotta fix whatever rendering issue is happening. Everything looks messed up.

My goal is to create a bunch of puzzle components so I can make a ton of levels. Right now it's trackpad only movement, but later I'll probably make teleporting puzzles as well for people who can't handle that. I already have the architecture in place for different types of levels and transitioning between them.

Hopefully the end result is a few solid hours of VR gameplay that has all the bells and whistles you'd expect from "experience", but also as an actual game. There's so few VR games out there, I just want something that's decent enough that you're not completely disappointed at how lackluster it is when you blow 10$ on it.

>tfw the whole team likes all the changes you put in the new build without bothering to run them by it

Heh yeah nobody plays indie games!

Shame that you fell for the graphics > gameplay meme, though.

>nobody plays indie games!
they don't. they only play faux-retro shit. find me a succesful non-pixel indie game

What kind of game is this?

KILL YOURSELF SOURCEQUEER

Superhot? Like a bunch of others?

Man, are you even a dev?

>tools nonexistant
modding is pretty much dead, yeah, but saying there aren't tools to make gamedev easier absolutely is not true.

Don't bother it's just reek getting drunk and crying to us again about how his "friends" at the pub weren't impressed with his mangled jumble of vertices pooped out of hammer into garry's mod. kek

there's still room for stylized graphics
for example:
newer Nintendo games
Banjo-Kazooie and imitators
Overwatch and Battleborn and other "larger than life" squad shooter affairs
fighting games
and yes, meme graphics, including Minecraft-style stuff, but not just Minecraft copies, for example several games by Blendo going to before Minecraft

>modding is pretty much dead

google "the witness"

hahahahahahahaha

is this a fangame of Better Late than Never?

>Man, are you even a dev?
I doubt someone who can't even manage to mod a game is able to dev one.

it's absolutely true. unity's editors are complete fucking garbage. unreals editors are complete fucking garbage. they're for AAA artists, not for game designers. often the art pipeline is extremely complex.

compare that with the oldschool bsp, tile, textured heightmap etc workflows. and the complexity of oldschool 3D packages compared to something like blender. it's just all too much. it would be a million times more practicable to work in milkshape than blender or maya. but the results just aren't acceptable by anyone, least of all me.

>modding is pretty much dead

>newer nintendo games
if you think that faux pixar aesthetic doesn't take incredible amounts of work you're deluded
>overwatch
even fucking worse
>fighting games
even right from the 8-bit days those were always an incredible amount of work for all the characters and animations to do for them

>unity's editors are complete fucking garbage. unreals editors are complete fucking garbage
Not if you're an actual dev and have your own assets to work with, dumb dumb. You're upset that real game dev engines aren't just modding an existing game? That's stupid.
>compare that with the oldschool bsp, tile, textured heightmap etc workflows. and the complexity of oldschool 3D packages compared to something like blender
Nobody gives a shit about your golden days formats. You're babbling about old tech like it was somehow better but where are your games in those engines? What have you done? Nothing. Shut the fuck up, retard.

I don't think he was saying those are easy graphics, just that they're stylized and even though they would look "bad" from a realism standpoint or don't push graphics to the max, they look good/appealing

You're forgetting the part where you made nothing with any of those engines. That's a relevant point.

Tinkerer.

yeah 6 year old me was definitely going to make the next smash hit quake mod
kys

so why don't you come up with something else?
the bottom line is that you don't need 50,000 polygons to make stuff look good if it's not meant to look like real life, and a lot of people won't really care if you have half the polygons if it's designed well, especially if you employ other tricks to make your game look good like controlling the lighting, the viewing angles, the contrast, the color palettes, and so on

>Shut the fuck up, retard.

That is a 9 year old's insult, user.

>japanese character design with objects on head that reflects their personality
That's the weirdest goddamn shit.

i think the point was you can get much more out of much less with stylized graphics than trying to make photoreal stuff as 1MA, without having to stoop to minecraft levels of art.

>crying drunkenly to a group of strangers about your nonexistent glory days as an aspiring game modder
>doing no game dev
>doing no mods
>telling people to "kys"
kay reek

Coffee exploration RPG where the goal is 5 minutes of miniadventures.

10000 polygons for a character is just about source quality, now look at all the shitposting about it and say to me straight you don't need 50000 polies in 2017 to be taken seriously

>if it's not meant to look like real life
fuck off retard

correct

casual cofe time in appaul tree fourest 4 the appauling

then you're just talking about overwatch instead of crysis 3. arguably even more difficult to pull off

>make model
>make it source quality with good topology
>slap on subsurface modifier
>edit the result

so hard.
I'm not saying modeling is easy because it isn't. But it isn't rocket science. If you have the ability to make a convincing model regardless if it's 1,000, 10,000, or 50,000 polygons, then you can make high polygon models. The only thing is that it takes more time.

...

>seriously
it's just a game bro

>The shitposting came from the model quality
>not the fact that they're intentionally retarded pieces of shit and people getting fed up with them

>slap on subsurface modifier
and look like a tech demo from 1984

Was that the last sentence of my post?

I was actually using a random high number, let's try again
you don't need 50 gajillion polygons to make something look good if it's not supposed to look like real life
see also:
animation
paintings and drawings
old-school special effects and prop-making

>meme graphics
rather kill myself

all of those require an insane amount of detail to look good

Reek, nobody cares about you, reek. Or your imaginary battles about engines, reek. or source, reek. Because, reek, you've never made a game, and never will, reek. Your name is reek, forever.

be my guest

Well, now you're just moving the goalposts.
No one expects an indie game to look like a multi-million dollar project, regardless of art style.
The point is that you don't need photorealism or 10 trillion polygons to have people play and enjoy your game.
Hell, even stylized graphics don't need to look that good, there's plenty of mobile garbage that makes boatloads of money and has a shit style.

Don't you get it? It's the engine's fault he can't make a game. All game engines have failed him.

Video games should really just stop existing because he can't make a mod.

>10k polys is too low
have you ever modeled in your life? am i talking to someone who is just pulling shit out of his ass?
i actually feel stupid for responding to this post.

Arguably you could make PS1/N64 models, do it well, and have people love it.

he's an artist, user. they're naturally inferior, it can't be helped

Good to see another thread of people shitposting and not posting progress

>REEE NO THAT'S MEMES REEE

I'd really like to see a source on that. Just because you like it doesn't mean anyone else does.

Not that fellow, and I like low-poly.

cookingwithlizardhips.gif

>2017
>reek is still the most no of the devs
Reek reek reek...

>all of those require an insane amount of detail to look good
they require a lot of care, not necessarily a lot of detail
Geiger's Alien for example, the xenomorph
it doesn't have a ton of detail in the first Alien movie and it's made out of leftover plumbing supplies and foam rubber and shit but it still made people scared, unnerved, and disgusted back in the day and gave them the undeniable sense this creature was alien and alive, and it still does that today
the second movie's aliens had a bunch of lines and grooves running across them but they really didn't have a ton more important detail, and that's basically the design(s) they've stuck with for however many additional movies, games, comic books and so on for all these years

Really wish there was an audiobook

I've got a lot of tedious work to do before my progress is postable, I'm going back and forth between that and other things
supposedly

Question for you guys, do you feel like these generals take away from productivity? Personally, in talking about my projects and posting demos and such I've found I'm less likely to finish it.

using leftovers doesn't mean they didn't put a lot of detail into it. the original suit had a fucking skull in the head. it's not at all comparable to early 3D graphics. it's still "AAA" quality with 50000 polies in that metaphor. the early stuff is more comparable to shit like a foam brain on a string or a guy covered in leaves in 50's monster flicks. cheap, shitty. charming, and absolutely not acceptable even for indie stuff in 2017

releaes when

If the models are simpler/low poly and the game isn't meant to be super realistic, it won't matter as long as the designs fit the lower quality model. Taking it a step further, there's probably enough people who had that as a childhood who would be perfectly happy to play a game with that style, even if it was supposed to be "realistic" for that extra pinch of nostalgia, especially if the game didn't have the technical limitations of that era like low fps or experimental clunky controls/camera.

I'll get started on the vocaroo

Its been 3 weeks now that I didn't participate in these threads (maybe on or two reply max per day) but I've been very productive.